When the War Began we Heard of Several Kings

The age of catastrophe devoured lives from many parts of the glove. Yet the 'Great War' also occasioned new encounters and experiences. Never before had ten thousand of non-elite South Asians moved across Europe. About two thousand of them, mostly sailors and soldiers who hailed from villages in Bengal, Nepla, the Northwest Frontier and Punjab, were held for years in German prison camps. They attracted the close attention of army officers, diplomats and scret agents, of emigrant revolutionaries like Har Dayal and Virendranath Chattopadhyay, of German artists, academics and industrialists. The captives made sense of these unusual encounters in their own ways. This volume approaches their difficult engagements from various angles. It introduces and makes available rich German archives as yet unknown to the non-German speaking world.

Franziska Roy is a doctoral candidate at the Department of History, University of Warwick.

Ravi Ahuja is Professor of modern Indian history and Dirctor of the Centre of Moern Indian Studies at the University of Gottingen.

Heike Liebau is Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Modern Oriental Studies (Berlin).